Cherish the Small Stuff

Confucius say:

 You can stand with your back to the sea and shoot fish in a barrel, but you ignoring the giant shark which eat people and boats.

Okay, Confucius wasn't around at the time when Jaws graced the big screen. But if he was and he worked on technology projects then he would have said something like that. Probably.

What this pearl of wisdom means in real terms is this. If you are working on a big project and you need to reduce timescales, axing the simple stuff is not only ineffectual but will ultimately be to the detriment of whatever you produce.

The Seven Truths of Open Source Software

Open Source Software is often described as 'free' software; as in 'free' speech rather than 'free' beer. I find this a distracting explanation as the words 'free beer' summon images of flipping burgers on a sizzling barbecue whilst taking large slugs of ice cold lager. See, I bet the last thing you feel like doing now is reading about boring old Open Source Software. But we must continue and quench your also parched brain with some delicious knowledge.

Buzzword Bazinga: Service Orientated Architecture

... is a grand way of building a system with a lot of moving parts. A simple system has two main things: resources and functions. Resources - such as databases and file systems - is where all information is stored and retrieved. Functions, and the applications that execute them, are the means to interact with the resources. Applications come in a number of guises such as web sites, desktop applications and mobile applications.

Depending on the size and scale of the system; applications can directly connect to these resources. Kind of like a Tie Fighter docking directly into the Death Star. The Death Star being a central core of massive evil; like, for example, a Microsoft Access Database.

But let's say distributing this evil is a galactical ambition and having one place where you can arm, equip and feed the Storm Troopers and send them out to do your nefarious bidding becomes a bottleneck. To scale, you would have look at spreading the resources and facilities around a bit. You could, for instance, take over a planet and build additional docking stations, dormitories with foosball (for those times when the rebels are not trying to overthrow you), and an array of vehicles you could use to turn small furry natives into road kill. The planet would then become a disconnected, fully functioning service of evil.

Buzzword Bazinga

Welcome all to the opening ceremony for Buzzword Bazinga, or BB from now on. I apologise in advance for the lack of fanfare, excitement and sparkle but I didn't have the directorial assistance of Danny Boyle . If you don't get the reference, then you clearly should pay more attention to the 2012 Olympics which is being hosted in East London - where I live. So if you are looking for a place to come and watch the proceedings and pay and exorbitant fee to stay in a tiny little pad, then drop me a line.

The Blackberry Playbook

I recently had the pleasure of attending a pre launch event for the new shiny, shiny BlackBerry PlayBook - RIM's new poster boy for tablet computing. Or poster girl if you like; as my colleague commented, "It sure is pretty." But looking past the gloss, the neat little canapés and the intoxicating hyperbole (or was that merlot) just what does this new toy mean to us gadget obsessed humanoids?

The short answer is I don't know. With a few technical hiccups and tight lipped responses to key questions like "what will it cost?" and "when can we get our greasy swipe, prod and pinch spanners on one?", it is simply too soon to tell.

But pre-launch demons aside, there were some real glimmers of promise.

Back to the Estimate

The life of a technical architect is one filled with magic and wonder. We often wonder how to perform expected feats of magic. Forgiving such poor word play, there is one duty we are faced with in our day to day that demands such a skill. This is The Estimate. Being asked to estimate for a project can be like magically predicting the future. Often with a lack of information, people to consult and pressure from the business to come up with the magic number that turns a profit and doesn't send the client packing, it is easy to get it very wrong. Like Marty McFly in Back To the Future II, how do you avoid a dystopian future where you've been fired, your music career is wasted and your wife’s turned out to be a bit of a bloater? Since you probably don't have a flux capacitor, your next best option is to abide by Tech Rash’s top tips for project estimation.

A Rough Guide: Software Specification

Software Development can be like going on a holiday to somewhere new. You always run the risk of getting very little sun, potentially ending up in a grotty hotel or getting messed up by muggers and left groaning and penniless in a filthy, urine saturated alleyway. So how do we avoid this scenario and make this holiday the one where we meet up with our new found holiday friends, knock back a few nostalgic caipirinhas and congratulate each other on what a brilliant time we all had?

The Yellow Brick Build: A project methodology

Thunder! Thunder! Thund! Thu.n.de.? 

In the world of project management methodologies there is a limited set of models we as a delivery team are asked to subscribe to. And once we do, often is the case where the project becomes a never ending battle between the theory and the reality. The best proposition for describing projects came from my old boss.

To quote:

"F*ck 'agile' and 'waterfall' - the new labels for project management are as follows: 'car crash' (small projects), 'train wreck' (medium sized projects), and 'airplane disaster' (large-scale projects)"

Is gaming dumbing down?

Many say that Kinect isn't for hardcore gamers because they like to sit on their arses, twiddle their thumbs and exert as little effort as possible. Not so; as this gamer demonstrates:

This has been doing the rounds but gems like these need to be showcased.

Location Based Search with FindPagesByCriteria

This is a quick follow on from my last post on Location Based Search with EasySearch.

Proximity search using standard EPiServer functionality is a lot easier since we can do numeric range searches with FindPagesByCriteria. All we need is a helper class which does the geo-stuff for you.

An approach to Content Modelling with EPiServer CMS 6

Trying to avoid this!

How content is managed and presented are two different functions within content management systems. An obvious statement, well yes: however, complexity rears its head once you start to look at how each CMS or WCM or WCMS (take your pick) supports these activities.

Enterprise CMSs generally follow a strong separation between the content storage and management, and content presentation layers. For content storage there are open source technologies like Apache Jackrabbit and JCR which serve to store, provide an interface to and version content structures; including relational hierarchies.  For content management there are rich editor interfaces which leverage the storage mechanism capabilities. For content presentation, there are technologies which work well with the notion of hierarchical content model such as MVC frameworks.

However, with EPiServer CMS the distinction is not as clearly defined with its page tree and web forms implementation. The page tree works very well in scenarios where there is a tight coupling between pages and page data. In cases where there is a relational content model – a kind of domain model for content - this doesn’t really fit.

So how do you go about modelling a content tree with hierarchical, referential relationships in EPiServer CMS 6?

Using Dynamic Content Controls for Composer Sort Of Functionality

During a recent project review I found myself looking at wireframes which looked much like the end of an intense Jenga session. There were lots of content blocks in different formations on what were meant to be single templates. Focusing on 1 template with 3 variations I queried how the layout of the page body could differ so dramatically and how each right hand column had a different selection of content elements.

“But surely Editors can just drag and drop content blocks onto a page? After all, we live in a world where you can buy 3D TVs and squeeze zits for points on the latest Smartphone App.” Came the perplexed and slightly paraphrased response.

Ah, you must be thinking of EPiServer Composer, I scoffed. Sadly, this was an EPiServer CMS 6 build and Composer was not in the project budget.

I now found myself in a wireframe prison where the only way out was to trick the guard by pretending to be Mr EPiServer ConPoser. (TeeHee)

So, what were my options?

EPiServer: Proximity Searching with EasySearch

A requirement which recently cropped up was for Property (as in house, flat, etc) searching through both attributes (e.g. number of bedrooms) and proximity (e.g. within 5 miles of some location). I’ll call ‘Properties’ ‘Assets from now on to avoid confusion.

For the attribute – or facet – search functionality we opted for a product called EasySearch. EasySearch - developed by NetworkedPlanet - is a great piece of software built on top of Lucene which ships natively with EPiServer. EasySearch provides tools to index EPiServer Content (Page Types and Files), web and user controls to search, view and narrow search results with selected facets, and administration tools to view and control the search index.

This was great for all aspects of our search requirements apart from proximity searching.

Apple's Last Stand

Apple’s recent amendment to their developer agreement - which forces developers to write applications their way using their tools - has done three things:

1. isolated Apple even more from the wider technical community,
2. wasted the time and money of companies and people who have invested in building iPhone compatible developer toolkits (and developers who have used them), and
3. diverted industry attention to other smart phone technologies.

There are a few victims of this controversial move worth paying tribute to.
Number one on the Apple’s shit list is Adobe whose Flash technology (which allows for media rich applications to run within a web browser) has been ruthlessly evicted from the iPhone party. iPhone users have undoubtedly noticed the small, sad-looking blue Lego blocks where content is expected. And there are sad little blue blocks aplenty since it’s estimated that over 98% of desktop browsers have Flash installed creating a rich ecosystem of games, mini applications and multi-media stuff. In a desperate bid to sneak back into the hottest shindig in town, Adobe developed a toolkit allowing developers to create applications in Flash and export them to the iPhone – a process known as cross compilation. Enter Apple’s new developer agreement which, paraphrased, reads “if you want to come to my party and you aren’t prepared to dress up, behave and have fun exactly as we want, then you can sod off.”

Welcome to Tech-Rash: A blog about technology that gets me itchy

Hello reader and welcome to yet another blog about technology.

Quite a broad - and dull if you you hate the stuff - subject I know; since technology intrudes into your life like pushy neighbors who always need to borrow your ladder.

But broad as the subject may be it is my dumping ground and time will tell if it proves to be a single seed (this post), a few random twigs of knowledge or towering redwood of digital ken.

Thank you and until next time.